Centos 7

if installing on an amd 6core box you need to do this first

Patch the AMD/kernel bug: add initcall_blacklist=clocksource_done_booting to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX in

vim /etc/default/grub

then

grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

Installing Flash so you can clock in/out in firefox

Do this:

rpm -ivh http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-release/adobe-release-x86_64-1.0-1.noarch.rpm
rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-adobe-linux 
yum install flash-plugin nspluginwrapper alsa-plugins-pulseaudio libcurl
killall -9 firefox

Relaunch firefox.

Updating Firefox pre-repo updates

Go here and Download the 64bit one https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/all/?q=English%20%28US%29

Set your workstation username: ### CHANGE TO YOURS

UsEr=CHANGE-ME

move to download dir and extract the files:

cd /home/$UsEr/Downloads
tar -jxvf firefox-[hit tab complete for the numbers]

Move to lib64 and swap the core out:

cd /usr/lib64
mv /usr/lib64/firefox /usr/lib64/firefox.old
cp -Rp /home/$UsEr/Downloads/firefox /usr/lib64/

Test it:

/usr/bin/firefox --version

Once you confirm it is running the up to date version run the following:

killall -9 firefox

Now you can launch the updated version of firefox. The next time the rpm updates it should update the files on its own still.

Updating Thunderbird pre-repo updates

Go here and Download the 64bit one https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/

Set your workstation username: ### CHANGE TO YOURS

UsEr=CHANGE-ME

move to download dir and extract the files:

cd /home/$UsEr/Downloads
tar -jxvf thunderbird-[hit tab complete for the numbers]

Move to lib64 and swap the core out:

cd /usr/lib64
mv /usr/lib64/thunderbird /usr/lib64/thunderbird.old
cp -Rp /home/$UsEr/Downloads/thunderbird /usr/lib64/

Test it:

/usr/bin/thunderbird --version

Once you confirm it is running the up to date version run the following:

killall -9 thunderbird

Now you can launch the updated version of thunderbird. The next time the rpm updates it should update the files on its own still.

Installing NVIDIA drivers

Install epel repo

yum install epel-release -y
yum install dkms glibc-devel.i686 libstdc++-devel.i686 -y
yum update

First run this to get video card version:

[root@vov ~]# lspci | grep -i vga | grep -i nvidia
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GK107 [GeForce GT 640] (rev a1)

After you know what card you have go to this site and download the driver for your version of linux. Make sure you choose 64bit linux as os.

http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us

Set your user as a variable to make this easier. UsEr=(username_here)

When the file is done downloading, move it to the /root folder and fix perms.

mv /home/$UsEr/Downloads/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-367.44.run /root
chown root.root /root/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-367.44.run
chmod +x /root/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-367.44.run

Once that has been done, now we need to alter the kernel options.

vim /etc/default/grub

Find this line:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="crashkernel=auto rd.lvm.lv=centos_vov/root rd.lvm.lv=centos_vov/swap rhgb quiet"

And change it as follows:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="crashkernel=auto rd.lvm.lv=centos_vov/root rd.lvm.lv=centos_vov/swap rhgb quiet nomodeset rdblacklist=nouveau"

Once that edit is made you need to rebuild grub2.

cp /boot/grub2/grub.cfg /root/grub.cfg
grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

Now you need to reboot the system, to finish disabling nouveau.

reboot

Once the server has rebooted, open a terminal and su to root.

su -

Now you need to switch to runlevel 3 so the gui is disabled.

init 3

Login as root and run the following:

/root/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-367.44.run

Follow the prompts through it, I recommend that you build the dkms module, and build the 32 bit comparabilities library. When it asks to replace the x-config select yes. Now when your back at the CLI.

Type reboot to finish the process off.

reboot